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The Part About Amalfitano
This is a guide to 'The Part About Amalfitano'. pg 164 It was Lola, Rosa's mother Natasha Wimmer: "Bolaño reserved his most unvarnished confessional and autobiographical material for his poems. In several poems from the massive posthumous volume La universidad desconocida, Bolaño makes reference to a girlfriend named Lola ('In the winter of ’78, in Barcelona, when I still lived with Lola!'), including enough detail to link her to the unstable Andalusian girlfriend described in the section of The Savage Detectives narrated by female bodybuilder María Teresa Solsona Ribot." pg 165 Lola's pretext was a plan to visit her favorite poet, who lived in the insane asylum in Mondragon, near San Sebastian Natasha Wimmer: "The object of Lola's obsession bears a pronounced resemblance to the Spanish poet Leopoldo Maria Panero (b. 1948), author of a collection titled Poems from the Mondragon Mental Hospital (among many other books), and a mental patient since the 1970s. (See also the sketch of Pelayo Barrendoain in The Savage Detectives.) In the introduction to a 2005 interview with Panero, Francisco Vejar notes that many believe Panero to be Spain's greatest living poet, and that he is difficult to interview because he's so heavily sedated. Vejar also informs the reader that Panero claims to be the reincarnation of Baudelaire. See also a four-minute YouTube clip of Panero strolling the woods (the grounds of the Mondragon asylum?) to the strains of Greensleeves, interspersed with footage from Frankenstein. pg 188 Pere Gimferrer, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and Juan Villoro Natasha Wimmer: "All friends of Bolaño. Pere Gimferrer (b. 1945): Catalan poet and critic, wrote the introduction to the Spanish edition of The Romantic Dogs. Part of a generation of poets (along with Leopoldo Maria Panero) dubbed Novisimos, after the influential anthology Nueve novisimos poetas espanoles (1970) Very New Spanish Poets. Rodrigo Rey Rosa (b. 1958): Guatemalan novelist and short story writer. Traveled to Tangier at the age of 22 to study with Paul Bowles. (Eventually, each would translate the other.) Juan Villoro (b. 1956): Mexican novelist, prolific essayist, and journalist. Met Bolaño in 1975, during a prize-giving ceremony hosted by the magazine Punto de partida, at which Bolaño won a third prize for poetry. It was Villoro (along with Bolaño's editor, Jorge Herralde) who convinced Bolaño to give up the title Storms of Shit in favor of By Night in Chile." pg 227 He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard et Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. Natasha Wimmer: "With 2666, Bolaño clearly chooses Moby-Dick over Bartleby. As Ignacio Echevarria points out in his 'Note to the First Edition' of 2666, Bolaño 'boasted...of having embarked on a colossal project, far surpassing The Savage Detectives in ambition and length.' In Fresan's words: 'What is sought and achieved here is the Total Novel, placing the author of 2666 on the same team as Cervantes, Sterne, Melville, Proust, Musil, and Pynchon.' "More on Moby-Dick, the quintessential Total American Novel, from Bolaño's introduction to a Spanish edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: '[Moby-Dick] is the key to those territories that by convention or for convenience's sake we'll call the territories of evil, where man does battle with himself and with the unknown and generally is defeated in the end.' Among other Melvillian echoes in 2666 is the speech delivered by Barry Seaman in Part III, reminiscent of the sermon delivered at the beginning of Moby-Dick by another spiritual leader with a salty past."